Audre Lorde Quotes

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.

...oppression is as American as apple pie...

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core - the fountain - of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night.

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house

When I dare to be powerful-to use my strength in the service of my vision-then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?